\section{Qualitative Research Interview}
\label{sec:interview}

According to Steinar Kvale the \textit{``semi-structured life-world interview attempts to understand themes of the lived daily world from the subjects' own perspectives.''} \citep[pp. 10-11]{KVALE} This goes hand in hand with our social-constructive approach of researching. The use of semi-structured interviews will enable us to analyse the \textit{``meaning of central themes of the subjects' lived world''} \citep[p. 11]{KVALE}, and semi-structuralism seeks to observe both what the interviewee says and also his non-vocal gestures, to see what is 'said between the lines'.

Steinar Kvale also emphasizes the importance of implying openness to new and unexpected phenomena by having a \textit{``qualified na\"{i}vet\'{e} and a bracketing of presuppositions rather that the interviewer posing pre-formulated questions with respect to prepared categories of analysis''} \citep[p. 12]{KVALE}, and so the aim is not to end up with \textit{``quantifiable meanings on the themes in focus.''} \citep[p. 13]{KVALE} Instead we want to end up with some semi-structured interviews from which we can condense common meaning and relevant themes. 

\subsection{Thematizing}

The structure of the interview has to be based on some kind of themes in order to catalyse systematic production of new knowledge \citep[p. 39]{KVALE}. The specific themes have to be deduced from our research question, and therefore deal with the interests regarding standards of the different shareholders and how these were conflicting with each other. We want to interview three people who were differently related to Symbian, and the thematization will help us generalize the empiricism. More about validation and generalization will be presented later.

\subsection{Interview Design}

It was important for us to interview people which could give us different insights of the problems of Symbian. It would not be sufficient to conduct interviews only with people from the board of Symbian, because their perception of the problems would probably only reflect one perspective of the subject of matter. Therefore we tried to get interviews with different people, and ideally we would have interviewed key people from all the shareholders as well as people from inside Symbian. We were able to get interviews with two key people of Symbian and one professor who has done a lot of critical research regarding Symbian (These will be presented in subsection \ref{subsec:presentation}). From a researching perspective we would have preferred to interview more people from other parts of the Symbian ecosystem, but this was not possible mainly due to our time limits. It would have been easier to generalize and test our hypothesis if the amount of interviewees had been higher, but at the same time this amount will enable us to make much more penetrating analyses of the interviews \citep[p. 43]{KVALE}. \bigskip

\noindent We wanted to create a common interview guide for the interviews with the key people of Symbian and one for the researcher. Both based on themes built upon our research question. We assumed that we could ask the professor about more academic topics, and that he was more independently related to Symbian compared to the two others:

\begin{quote}
\textit{``Ancarani and Shankar they wrote in their article about the alliance formation, that the formation is of great importance and the alliances with partners having symmetric knowledge hinder innovation and we want to know if you think that it was also one of the cases for Symbian?''}
\end{quote}

\noindent This gave us some very specific academic related insights of the interests of the shareholders and the issues relating to the formation of an alliance. We were aware that we were talking to an expert, and as expected he was elaborating a lot on the questions and thereby he created a foundation from which we could try to condense meanings. \bigskip

\noindent We asked the two key persons of Symbian identical questions to make it easier to generalize and thematize. We started off with general questions like:

\begin{quote}

\textit{``Can you give an introduction of yourself and your relation to Symbian?''}

\end{quote}

\noindent We wanted to make them comfortable and make them speak a lot from the beginning. The fact that we sent them our interview guide before the interview made them aware of our topic and that made it easier for us to point the interview in the right direction. The semi-structure of the interviews enabled the interviewee to speak as much as he could while we could stop him if they went off a tangent. \bigskip

\noindent All the three interviews were conducted using Skype, most often without video, and so it was almost impossible to observe non-vocal gestures in these situations. 

Transcriptions of the interviews can be found in appendices \ref{chap:davidwoodinterview}, \ref{chap:davidlevininterview} and \ref{chap:joelwestinterview}.


\subsection{Presentation of Interviewees}
\label{subsec:presentation}

Here we will make a short presentation of the three interviewees and describe their relation to Symbian.

\subsubsection{David Wood}

David Wood is co-founder of Symbian and was a former employee of the PDA manufacturing company Psion, who was the main driver behind the formation of a consortium. He engaged in all main licenseeing discussions and was one of the decision-makers behind the inclusion of Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, which happened in 1998. He was a part of the initial executive team and had responsibility for technical consulting, which were the teams that interfaced to the licensees. Between 1996 and 2009 he had continuous service on various leadership teams.

When Nokia took over the shares of the remaining partners in 2009, David Wood decided to leave Symbian (Track 1: 1.00).

\subsubsection{David Levin}

David Levin was Chief Executive Officer of Symbian between 2002 and 2005. Before that he was a member of the supervisory board four or five years (Track 2: 01.05). These years were glory for Symbian who gained market and Siemens and Samsung joined the consortium, which increased the number of devices running Symbian remarkably.

David Levin left Symbian in 2005 because he felt that the strategic position of Symbian was compromised (Track 2: 02.33). \bigskip

\noindent This was the only interview with live video. 

\subsubsection{Joel West}

Joel West is Professor of Innovation \& Entrepreneurship at the Keck Graduate Institute\footnote{\url{http://www.joelwest.org/About/}}.  He has done extensive research in the innovation and entrepreneurial field and has done a lot of research regarding open innovation in Symbian. He has also written several books, articles and columns about programming and computer science, mainly in the late 1980's\footnote{\url{http://www.joelwest.org/Research/CS.html}}. He also worked as a consultant for Symbian and helped them with open innovation and open source strategies, and university engagements (Track 3: 20.57).


\subsection{Verification and Meaning Condensation}

Because we use use qualitative data gathering it is important to consider the validity and reliability and thereby the objectivity of the interviews. This will give us an insight into what extent we can use their statements \citep[pp. 120 and 122]{KVALE}. The reliability of an interview refers to \textit{``whether a finding is reproducible at other times and by other researchers.''} \citep[p. 122]{KVALE} One could for example suspect David Levin and David Wood for having held back information during the interview because of non-disclosure agreements.  

Validity describes the degree of truth, correctness and strength of statements. An example of a validity increasing circumstance is the situation where Joel West stops his talking and writes down what he just said because he wants to include it in his future research.

As such the validity is determined by \textit{``the degree that a method investigates what it is intended to investigate.''} \citep[p. 122]{KVALE} The validity of the specific interviews will be continuously discussed throughout the analysis in chapter \ref{chap:analysis}. \bigskip

\noindent For the analysis we use Steinar Kvale's theory of meaning condensation. Here the \textit{``[l]ong statements are compressed into briefer statements in which the main sense of what is said is rephrased in a few words.''} \citep[p. 107]{KVALE} In this way we can deduce common themes from all the interviews and analyse them based on a common framework. This will help us discuss our research question a lot. Of course it varies how much every interviewee is saying about each of the themes - this will be discussed further in chapter \ref{chap:analysis}.

In the beginning of the analysis chapter we will show the outcome of a meaning condensation of the three interviews.